Floor Show, Act I

Woo-hoo! Our new hardwood is going in on the third floor!

Kathy and I drained a lot of wine bottles discussing how and when we'd install new flooring upstairs. At first, we figured we'd do it ourselves. How hard can it be, right? But as the year wore on and we found ourselves juggling quite enough other projects, thank you, the sensible alternative of hiring pros started to sound a lot better.

So a week after the materials were delivered, the four-man team of installers showed up bright and early on Monday morning. We'd already cleared out the furniture and removed all the offending trim and baseboards to make everything ready for them. Surprisingly, they agreed. Everything was ready to go and they wasted no time before hammering away.

Kathy and I had also spent a lot of hours wondering whether we'd prefer to run the floorboards this way or that way. Should they run left-to-right or front-to-back? Should they align down the hallway or across the room? What would look better? What do other people do? What do the experts say?

We needn't have bothered. The boards have to run perpendicular to the underlying subfloor. You don't get a choice. Okay, problem solved, then. Nailing the floorboards athwart the subfloor also makes everything stronger and helps eliminate squeaks, so that's a bonus.

The installers started in the middle and worked outwards, nailing the very first board in Kathy's doorway. That way, if the rooms aren't square (if?), the uneven boards will be against the outside walls and partially hidden by new baseboards.

These guys are fast. One unpacks boxes of oak floorboards and spreads them out on the floor. A second one unrolls black backing paper onto the subfloor, and the third guy nails each board down using a pneumatic flooring gun. The fourth one mans the chop saw, cutting off board ends to fit the space.

Every once in a while they all stop to rearrange the loose boards lying on the floor. There's a real art to this. For starters, you don't want the board ends to line up; they should all be staggered, but in such a way that you don't see a stair step pattern. You also want to mix up the boards between boxes. We got about 23 boxes of flooring in all, and the boards from each box will naturally come from different oak trees. (That would be one big tree otherwise.) So there will be variations in color, grain, and so on. You want to mix those up so that one room isn't all dark, loose-grained wood while another room is lighter, tighter oak. So they stir up the pieces as they go along. When it's all done, your eye shouldn't be able to pick out any patterns, stripes, or light/dark areas.

This is going to be a noisy week.